Weaving the Journey: Female Trajectories and Shifts of the Gaze through Margaret Atwood’s Rewriting of the Odyssey
Abstract
Travel constitutes one of the structuring motifs of Western literature and has historically remained associated with a masculine figure of movement, adventure, and discovery. Homer’s Odyssey represents one of its foundational paradigms: the narrative is built around Odysseus’s journey, while Penelope, who remains in Ithaca, appears to embody stability, patience, and the domestic sphere. This opposition between masculine mobility and feminine immobility nevertheless deserves closer examination. Through a rereading of the Odyssey and its contemporary rewriting by Margaret Atwood in The Penelopiad, this article proposes to reconsider the notion of female peregrination beyond geographical movement alone. Penelope’s weaving thus constitutes a temporal, symbolic, and metaphysical journey, while Atwood’s rewriting brings about a major shift in the analytical perspective by transforming the represented woman into the subject of enunciation. Weaving then becomes a metaphor for writing and rewriting: undoing the old narrative makes it possible to produce another. The article therefore brings together gender studies, traditional philosophy, and literary theory in order to advance the hypothesis that female inner pilgrimage may also be understood as a displacement of the gaze, the voice, and the representation of the self and the Other.
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References
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